Sally Magnusson > Quotes

“A nation discovers its truest dignity when it cherishes the dignity of those from whom it has not heard for a very long time.”
― Sally Magnusson, Where Memories Go

“but in the really dark dark you could feel the presence of something old on All Hallow's Eve; boundaries about to breach, the skin of reality stretched so thin you might go seeing through it any minute, to your benefit or to your harm.”
― Sally Magnusson, Music in the Dark

“Do not treat worst the one you love best.”
― Sally Magnusson, The Sealwoman's Gift

“It was the kind of morning on the threshold of dawn when you sense everything holding its breath, the ground soft and expectant, the air eager for the sun, the stillness pregnant with vitality but not quite there yet. Any day now the trees would explode and flowers shoot from the earth and toads make their bid for freedom and scents assail you and the rowdy geese rooster home. But for the moment the land was waiting.”
― Sally Magnusson, Music in the Dark

“gaggles of waifs in fancy dress were roaming the dark streets. He had forgotten it was Halloween. The gaslights along Anne Street shone on sallow faces plastered in chalk, small heads in scarves and oversized flat caps, flaps of bed-sheet over baggy shorts, scrappy skirts over insect legs and shoeless feet”
― Sally Magnusson, Music in the Dark

“circular”
― Sally Magnusson, The Ninth Child

“To put the question another way, is the brain all there is to us, a fantastically clever machine that creates a mind, which in turn creates an illusory sense of an independent self, which then collapses when
the brain itself starts to die? Or is there such a thing as a separate selfhood, a secret core of self which I imagine as a glossy pearl,
existing separately and staying safe from the most violent assaults on the body and of the body?”
― Sally Magnusson, Where Memories Go

“He had wanted to be a churchman all his life, so he said, and as a bairn used to practice preaching to the beasts in his father's cattle shed, wagging his forefinger at their patient heads and shaking his own in sorrow at the depths of their depravity.”
― Sally Magnusson, Music in the Dark

“I learned that knowing the time of day is not as important as one might think and that one hour of happiness is worth very much more when it is consciously valued and celebrated.”
― Sally Magnusson, Music in the Dark

“Do not treat worst the one you love best. I hear you, Oddrún. But that still leaves a question the saga does not ask. It may be that the sealwoman had it in mind that an answer should be sought to this, too. Is it by the wanting that we measure love, or by something else?”
― Sally Magnusson, The Sealwoman's Gift